Atul Gawande Quotes

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Atul Gawande

Profession : Scientist

Birth : November 5, 1965

Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage.

Atul Gawande

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Atul Gawande

I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.

Atul Gawande

Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.

Atul Gawande

People say that the most expensive piece of medical equipment is the doctor's pen. It's not that we make all the money. It's that we order all the money.

Atul Gawande

I think we are faced in medicine with the reality that we have to be willing to talk about our failures and think hard about them, even despite the malpractice system. I mean, there are things that we can do to make that system better.

Atul Gawande

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

Atul Gawande

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.

Atul Gawande

My vantage point on the world is the operating room where I see my patients.

Atul Gawande

No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.

Atul Gawande

I write because it's my way of finding cool ideas, thinking through hard problems and things I don't understand, and getting better at something.

Atul Gawande

Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.

Atul Gawande

We now live in the era of the super-specialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn't.

Atul Gawande

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my patients will not even be postponed. Another surgeon would step in and take over. The reason to do research and writing is that it at least makes me feel not entirely replaceable. If I didn't write, I don't know if I would do surgery.

Atul Gawande

Every country in the world is battling the rising cost of health care. No community anywhere has demonstrably lowered its health-care costs (not just slowed their rate of increase) by improving medical services. They've lowered costs only by cutting or rationing them.

Atul Gawande

As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.

Atul Gawande

To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation - head down, trying not to screw up, trying to make it from one day to the next - that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and asking how much money you want to make.

Atul Gawande

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination.

Atul Gawande

I have always believed that there is nothing greater than a life in rock n' roll - it has to be good rock n' roll - and I still think it is true.

Atul Gawande

I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write.

Atul Gawande